This ecommerce strategy article is an excerpt from our new book, The Ultimate Ecommerce Email & SMS Playbook. We’re diving into our ecommerce strategy chapter focused on the 7 Reasons Why Ecommerce Customers Leave Your Brand.
Piggybacking on the rise of acquisition costs, investing in a customer retention strategy goes beyond ad dollars and cents. Even when COVID-19 ends, or if Amazon decides to hang it all up, or even if paid media decreases in cost, there’s one constant that still remains.
It costs 600% more to acquire a customer than it costs to retain one. From a conversion point of view, existing customers convert 67% of the time while new customers convert 13% of the time. The ROI is all in retention, not acquisition.
I always tell our clients that I tend to strip ideas down to the basics. I ask them to explain their challenges to me like I’m a five-year-old. Sometimes when you think about how to explain complex strategies to kids, you realize that some ideas are extremely simple to understand.
A great example of this is the cart abandon email. Every client asks me if our team will help them with cart abandon and site abandon, and everything abandon. Considering we’re the experts in email and SMS, turning on abandon automations is a given. But the real question that any five-year-old would ask is why they are abandoning them in the first place. That’s the REAL challenge to fix.
Acquisition is another one that needs to be understood from a basic level. Most brands think that a great marketing strategy entails a paid search, paid social and retargeting plan.
Here’s how we look at it: you’re paying Google and Facebook to drive traffic to your website… and then paying Google and Facebook to bring them back to your website when they leave. Question: what are you doing to keep them there and capture their data, if not their sale? Seems like all brands are doing is making Google and Facebook rich.
Focusing on acquisition, paid search, and retargeting avoids the main issues you should be focusing on: converting customers when they come to your site and growing their value after they sign up and buy.
The urgency to refocus on retention becomes even more pressing when you realize that 74% of customers are one-time buyers; the potential to grow those customers is often overlooked yet has immense profit potential.
So, while your brand keeps gifting Google and Facebook your hard-earned dollars, you’re simultaneously leaving customer value untapped and unrealized. That potential alone should strike a sense of urgency in your marketing right now.
The need to have a solid customer retention strategy powered by email and SMS is critical now. With Amazon’s dominant flywheel stealing customers, apps inserting themselves as middlemen, and declining return-on-ad-spend (ROAS), the importance of email and SMS is more urgent than ever.
Let’s do a final recap of the challenges, opportunities, and importance of having an email and SMS strategy in place. We’ve established why customers leave brands for competitors and why email and SMS will keep them loyal. We then focused on why most brands fail at email and SMS, even though it’s critical for brands to get it right at this point in time.
Now, the final question remains: how does your brand get it right and create better customer relationships that unlock huge amounts of revenue and profits? And how can your brand turn email and SMS into the most profitable, predictable, and sustainable revenue stream?
We’ve officially arrived at the strategy phase, what we call our S.P.A.M. Strategy. What I’m about to share with you is the exact blueprint that the top 1% use to drive their business forward, unlock immense revenue streams, build profitable customer lifetime value and scale faster than their competitors.
In order to implement this strategy, let’s first ensure you have the building blocks in place to achieve success in email and SMS.
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